Mohandas, Martin and Barry

Yesterday evening we watched the movie Gandhi. It's one of those movies I had seen in bits and pieces, but never the whole thing from start to finish.

About halfway through, Jason turned to me and asked, "What do you think of that Gandhi fellow?"

And I told him I thought that, like Martin Luther King, Jr, who followed years later, Gandhi understood humanity.

A truth will resonate with us. Truth, expressed simply, cannot be denied for long. One may attempt to deny it, but after some point, it must be actively denied. You have to willfully ignore the truth.

That is what Gandhi did, it is what King did: quietly held up a truth.

And on some level, it is what Barack Obama did during his campaign and continues today. I've read and listened to people willfully denying the truth since the election. They have become more and more rabid and are bordering on becoming incoherent.

Here is the simple truth. This is what appealed to me and, I believe, so many others in this nation.

We have the power.

We, the people, if we will just speak up, if we will just act, have the power to shape our government.

After years of feeling like our representatives had all the power over us, were ignoring us and acting in their best interests instead of ours, Obama simply reminded us that all we needed to do was take our rightful power back.

With our vote. With an email, a phone call, a letter.

The differences between Republican and Democrat aren't all that great. It's just that over the last 20 years or so, increasingly in the last eight, we've believed whatever the media told us and the media, seeking higher ratings, trotted out the most absurd examples of either end of the political spectrum and allowed the lunatic fringe to be the face of left or right.

We've stopped talking to each other. We call each other names and paste labels that hinder understanding and communication.

And deep down, on a fundamental human level, we know that is wrong. It is the simple truth that most Americans want the same things for this nation and their families that is finally being given voice again.

We want our humanity back. We want to be one nation. We want the anger and stress and strife to stop. We want to start working together again.

We want to be the America our forefathers dreamed of again.

The boyz say: Can't we all just get along?